


everything hurts. nothing does.

by openhearts



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2019-07-29 19:37:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16270958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openhearts/pseuds/openhearts
Summary: While they're hiding in the trunk, Beth's mind wanders.





	everything hurts. nothing does.

It's strange holding to still in the trunk; they'd been running for so long and her legs start to cramp. Daryl's elbow digs into her shin, he's got his stabilizing arm propped there, eyes never wavering from the small gap where the trunk hangs slightly open. The car shakes and groans with the weight of the dead bumping and plodding into it and around it. The smell starts to seep in at the worst of it, when it feels like the horde will never end and she and Daryl will starve to death before they ever get out. The thought passes through her mind quickly before she realizes it, the thought of letting herself bleed out right there, but it's like every time she's thought of it since Maggie's fingers pressing too sharp and painful into her wrist where the cut she'd made hadn't even reached the thin fragile bones just beneath her thin fragile skin. 

Her skin hadn't been fragile though. Not how she'd thought. Pale and thin and strong, it had stretched and dragged before tearing around the rough edge of the mirror, and made her work at it. 'You're not even strong enough to die,' her mind had taunted. And then she had gotten mad. Mad at the voice licking at her ear for telling her how easy it would be, how the pain would be so brief and so euphoric that dying would be just a moment of bliss before blackness.

'Liar,' she'd whispered, dropping the shard of mirror, as she started to cry. There were barely tears, just the helpless shivering sobs of a child looking up and realizing she's gotten lost. She'd apologized to Maggie, still stuck in the self-loathing without even realizing it. "I'm sorry," sorry she wasn't strong enough to deal with it, to walk in the living breathing sun-soaked world still feeling the flaking waxy skin of their mother's corpse grasp at her arms. The gurgling snarl in her ears telling her how easy, how simple and bright it would be to die.

Beth flinches. Daryl's hand on her leg, shaking her knee. She opens her eyes and notices the fresh hot tears on her face, her hands clenching into fists around the handle of the knife so tight it feels like the wood and leather of the handle will mold and bend in her grip. Her throat feels raw. She doesn't know if she's made some noise, some cry through her teeth as she ground them. He's staring, frowning like anger but the slat of light coming in from outside is on his eyes and they're scared. She looks away, blinks slowly and makes her mouth an 'oh', breathing long and slow in through her nose and then out through her mouth. 

She breathes in the stale musty trunk smell. Daryl's sweat, her own, the dirt-smell and the dead still shifting and groaning outside. She unclenches one hand from the knife handle and ignores the stiffness and pain in her hand when she reaches over and touches his wrist. His hand is still under hers, eyes still flicking back and forth from her to the opening of the trunk, but the touch seems to tell him whatever he's looking for and he shifts back to lean his shoulder against the back corner of the trunk, readjusting his grip on his bow and settling into perfect stillness again.

She becomes still within herself, smaller inside so that her body fits in this space and doesn't protest the awkward bent position she's stuck and clenched in. She wiggles her toes in her boots and flexes her knees, lifts up just slightly to feel the painful shift of her tailbone on the floor of the trunk, ignoring Daryl's sharp intake of breath. She nods at his hand held up to tell her to be still. 

Everything hurts, and nothing. She thinks about the space in the trunk, the empty space, and how much air is coming in and how many sounds. She concentrates on the size of the gap between the trunk and the lid, and in her mind it measures the same as the spaces between the bars of the prison cell doors. Everything echoed there, everything opened and let in every sound, every murmur as she would lay waiting for sleep. 

Beth's ear had tuned to Judith's voice quickly over the first days and weeks after she'd been born. Beth had quietly taken her the first night, slept half sitting up with Judith's weight pressing on her chest, heavy and limp and breathing. Beth had babysat before, before, had held babies and toddlers as they'd slept, but never one so small and new, never one without a mother to give her back to. Beth had carried and rocked and held the infant nameless girl skin to skin, and thought of the feel of her own mother's hands on her and her own mother's heartbeat in her ear. She thought of the explosions of bullets tearing through the air, the dust and the screams, and the pink wrinkled fingers balled in a loose fist resting against the pulsepoint in her neck.

Later Rick came out of the tombs, shaken and pale but clean. Seeing him hold Judith a little awkwardly, as if she weighed nothing because the shock and adrenaline were still thrumming in his veins. Slowly, though, he'd settled back into his body, into the weight Beth had sat with those first nights. She'd watched it happen, watched his hands grow more sure, more firm as he held his daughter. Soon she would lay quiet and still in her bed and listen as Rick, a few cells over, lifted Judith from her crib in middle of the night, his voice like the low scrape of a fiddle interrupting Judith's impatient hm-ing whines. Beth would turn on her side, curl up with her knees all the way to her chest, and listen to Rick's voice soothing, to the soft rustle and scrape of blankets, to the creak of the springs of his bunk, and then the sigh, a low deep hum that she knew reverberated through him and through Judith's warm body curled safe and asleep on his chest.

Beth reaches up and scrubs a hand over her face, wiping at her eyes. She sits up. Everything hurts. Nothing does. She reaches for the rag keeping the trunk lid tied down, and pulls.


End file.
